The present invention relates to the field of collaborative computing and more particularly to the personalization of a desktop user interface in a collaborative space.
Collaborative computing refers to the use by two or more end users of a computing application in order to achieve a common goal. Initially envisioned as a document sharing technology among members of a small workgroup in the corporate environment, collaborative computing has grown today to include a wide variety of technologies arranged strategically to facilitate collaboration among members of a workgroup. No longer merely restricted to document sharing, the modern collaborative environment can include collaborative tools such as document libraries, chat rooms, video conferencing, application sharing, and discussion forums to name only a few.
Currently, it is rare that a goal of any importance is entrusted and reliant upon a single person. In fact, most goals and objectives can be achieved only through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals, each serving a specified role or roles in the process. Consequently, to provide computing tools designed for use only by one of the individuals in the process can be short sighted and can ignore important potential contributions lying among the other individuals involved in the process.
Business processes encapsulate the knowledge of operations and services provided by a business organization. Typically, a workflow represents a business process as a sequence of steps. The workflow describes essential tasks, business roles, and resources required by a process. A role, such as a marketing manager, links individuals to business processes and defines activities that an individual undertakes in order to achieve a desired business objective. Roles generally operate across a number of processes, performing different steps in each process based upon an adequate segregation of duties for the business.
A collaborative space is a collaborative computing environment including a user interface which combines different collaborative tools for use by collaborative interacting users in achieving a common objective. A workplace is a form of a collaborative space that defines information, services and applications to be integrated in the working environment of a user in order to facilitate the performance of business activities by employees. For example, a workplace provides a single point to allow a market manager to create a campaign, check the inventory and e-mail vendors. In this ever changing business environment, business processes are constantly customized to meet requirements for an organization. Individuals are frequently re-assigned to fulfill different tasks. Accordingly, a workplace is needed to support the changing nature of the business domain.
Unfortunately, business workplaces are often designed to fulfill functions of an end-to-end process. In particular, the user interfaces of such workplace applications are based upon the functionality of the system itself and the workplace applications are designed by technologist with regard to meaningful activities specified by business users. For instance, within a commercially available commerce server product, it is known to provide a central location to manage a commerce Web store including product management, store administration, marketing and customer service.
The menu items of the commerce server product generally are defined through a configuration file and are dynamically displayed based upon user roles. Notwithstanding, the content of the configuration file is determined by software developers without references to the underlying business process models.